With shaking fingers, Bilaal sent the recordings into fast-forward.
The video counter spun wildly for a few seconds. “Ah! There! Stop there.”
Bilaal clicked on the play button. The two gunmen were now screaming back and forth to one another, agreeing to immediately begin shooting the moment anyone entered the shrine. They shouted out blessings to one another as well as praise for being chosen as martyrs. Seconds later, creaking hinges made the two gunmen retreat and take positions with their weapons trained on the shrine’s southern doors.
“Now watch, Bilaal.” Grinning, Ghalib eased back and folded his arms. “We begin here.” Ghalib tapped the images captured by camera one: doors slowly parting, moonlight spilling in through the opening.
Bilaal leaned closer to try to discern the dark silhouettes that appeared in the shrine’s doorway, but he couldn’t make out any of it. Then something completely unexpected happened. In chorus, all nine video frames filled with static as the feeds went off-line.
“What the—”
“What did you do there?” Ghalib snapped. “Fix that.”
As he shrank in his chair, Bilaal’s fingers worked feverishly at the keyboard, rewinding, fast-forwarding. Ghalib’s sharp chin was practically resting on his left shoulder, so close he could feel the Keeper’s hot breath on his neck.
After the fourth attempt, the static still came back.
“What did you do?” he hissed, nostrils flaring.
“I—I—” Bilaal was shaking his head in bewilderment, holding his hands out at the screen. “Nothing. I swear. It’s the recordings. They just ... They stop.”
“Impossible! I watched it all happen! I watched everything through those cameras!” Ghalib slammed a hand down on the table beside him. “Did you erase the files?” Crazed, he jabbed an index finger at the tech’s face. “Tell me you didn’t erase them, Bilaal!”
He cowered in his chair. “This isn’t something I could’ve done. You’ve been watching me this whole time. I could not have . . .” He kept shaking his head. “I erased nothing— I swear it!”
Over the next hour, Ghalib kept at it with Bilaal, going over the corrupted footage again and again . . . and again. Bilaal adjusted settings, tested the connection, swapped cables, ran diagnostics on the hard drive. Yet each time, at the very moment the shrine’s doors opened, the static would take over. For good measure, Bilaal went through the entire process again using a second laptop that was his backup.
Same thing. Static.
Finally, dripping with sweat and pale as goat’s milk, Bilaal tried to play back the footage Ghalib had shot with his own camcorder. That’s when something even more astounding appeared—more static. The entire disc had been wiped out.
“What are you doing!” Ghalib erupted. “See what you’ve done now! What have you done!”
But after he saw the inexplicable fate of the second disc, Bilaal’s demeanor had changed dramatically. The man was spooked. “What happened to these videos,” he calmly replied, shaking his head slowly and steadily, “I cannot explain it. I can only take your word that there were videos here. But if there
“What might that be?” Ghalib growled.
“What have
94
******
Rome
The sterile corridors of the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic were a stark reminder of an alternate fate that might have befallen Charlotte Hennesey. Behind every door of the critical care wing, Death was patiently waiting.
Knowing that she’d been endowed with the ability to change the fate of so many was overwhelming. There was no guarantee that she could reverse the damage of every malady. But ALS would certainly be considered one of the toughest, and she’d handled that one swimmingly. According to the Gospels, the laundry list of Jesus’s healings included the lame, the crippled, the paralyzed, lepers, the deaf, the mute, and the blind. Of course, there were His multiple exorcisms too. Not to mention the granddaddy of them all: raising the dead. What was Charlotte Hennesey supposed to do about that one? How dead was dead? Was there a limited window of time to repair the effects of death? Regardless, it was already too late for Evan. His body had been cremated the same morning her abductors had flown her to Israel.
Startled, Charlotte immediately quickstepped to the wall. “Sorry.” A quintet of paramedics and doctors sped past with a stretcher between them. Their neat formation—two on each side, one at the rear—brought to mind Olympic bobsledders. The poor man laid out on the cushion, bare from the waist up, had suffered terrible burns to the chest, arms, and face. His eyes were wide open in shock, limbs twitching.
The tremendous urge to stop them, to intervene, to lay her hands on the poor man, was agonizing. Breathless, she watched the triage unit disappear behind the burn unit’s mechanized double door at the end of the corridor.
The raw emotions tugging at her made her feel like a drug addict undergoing withdrawal. It got her thinking about how Jesus came to cope with all this. Had he been scared too? Had he had doubts that he was worthy of such a thing? After all, though God may have touched Him, He still had been human. Did He also feel lonely, lost, and confused? How did Jesus choose who to heal, how many to heal?
Such power could provoke so many different responses, from full-blown magnanimity to runaway misanthropy—perhaps even delusional mania. No doubt she needed guidance, temperance . . . faith. But where was she supposed to find the right answers? This wasn’t exactly suitable material for psychoanalysis.
That’s when she knew that the best place to begin was here, in Rome.
A young woman in sky-blue scrubs came over from the nurse’s station.
The garments’ color had Charlotte flashing back to the robe that had once covered the egomaniacal misanthrope who’d been reduced to ashes at the foot of the Ark of the Covenant.
